Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

by Tom Holt

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ Paul replied. He hesitated. ‘Well, I’d better go, then. Before Mr Dao comes back.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Paul turned to go, but found he couldn’t; something was pinning him down, like a great weight. ‘Um,’ he said, ‘excuse me, but you wouldn’t happen to know what it is about me that means death has no jurisdiction over me?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Pause. Silence. ‘Can you tell me what it is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fine.’ Paul waited, then went on. ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s better that you don’t know. Trust me.’

  Well, put like that—‘One last thing,’ Paul said. ‘Are you really, really the Great Cow of Heaven?’

  Audumla looked at him, great big round cow eyes. ‘Moo,’ she said. ‘Mind how you go.’ Then, without a crack or a hum or a blur or any visible or audible accompaniment (because, apart from the bewildering storylines and the cheesy sets, real life isn’t a bit like Star Trek) she vanished; and there was nothing to show that she’d ever been there, apart from a small, slightly steaming brown pile.

  ‘Moo,’ Paul said. ‘Brilliant.’

  He had, of course, forgotten to ask her how to get to the Bank from there, wherever ‘there’ was. But that was just sloppy thinking, of course. He walked in a straight line, and ten yards or so from the cow-pat he came to the Bank’s main gate. There was nobody to be seen in any direction. Well, of course not. Mr Dao was talking to Benny, and the rest of them, the hundreds of thousands of billions of dead people - probably away somewhere playing bridge, or practising German irregular verbs, or learning how to weave baskets.

  Moo, he thought, as he barged his way through a revolving door that hadn’t been there the last time. And why on Earth would the Great Cow of Heaven approve of Rupert Murdoch? He shrugged. Somehow, involuntarily, more by luck than judgement, he’d solved a fair few of the fundamental mysteries of the universe lately. It doesn’t do to push one’s luck.

  Today the Bank only had one room, and fortuitously that room happened to be the safe-deposit vault. Paul had no trouble at all finding the box, and of course it wasn’t locked. Inside there were just two objects: a roll of thin plastic sheeting, spitting image of the one he’d owned for a little while, and a half-empty tin of Bird’s custard powder. As simple as that; but maybe everything’s simple when you’ve got the Great Cow of Heaven on your side.

  Fine. All he had to do now was find a wall, spread the Door across it, and step through.

  No wall.

  It came as something of a surprise at first, but when Paul stopped to think about it, why should there be a wall? Not needed here, after all. He retraced his steps, and there, sure enough, was the revolving door he’d come in by; but it was free-standing. No wall.

  Bugger.

  ‘I could have told you,’ Mr Dao whispered urbanely in his ear. ‘Never trust a ruminant. Anything with that many stomachs is bound to have its own agenda.’

  ‘Go away,’ Paul said.

  ‘There’s no call for hostility,’ Mr Dao replied. ‘I’m trying to be sensitive. You were having problems coming to terms with the situation. That is, of course, perfectly understandable. In such cases, we find it’s best to allow the subject a moment of hope, usually triggered by the manifestation of some apparently supernatural agency or object of faith. We noted that you seemed to believe in the existence of divine dairy cattle, and accordingly framed the illusion in the form that you would be most likely to accept. You believed; you did as you were told, came here, took the Door, only to find that there is no wall to place it against. As is only to be expected, here in the middle of nothing. I trust you have learned the lesson: all hope is illusory. It has no place here. We try to exclude all harmful and misleading influences, for the good of the community. Hope isn’t a good thing, Mr Carpenter. Hope is a parasite. It dupes people into soldiering on, forcing themselves to keep going through pain, trauma and misery, until finally they can go no further and end here, where all things end. Ignore hope, and you get here quicker, with less distress and anguish. Now you know the truth about hope, having experienced its bad effects for yourself. Now, perhaps, you will come quietly.’

  It was as though there was a fish-hook lodged in every part of Paul’s body, each one tugging at him, drawing him away. Really, said every instinct, there isn’t any point, you’re just being embarrassing. Stop making trouble for everybody. Go in peace.

  ‘Last time,’ Paul said, and his voice seemed to come from somewhere else. ‘Last time, there was a wall. There was a wall, and I got away.’

  ‘That was because it wasn’t your time,’ Mr Dao explained patiently. ‘Now, it’s right and proper that you should be here, and so there is no wall. Give me the Portable Door - you shouldn’t really have taken it and I have responsibilities. Give it to me and let me end all this for you. Please.’

  ‘There was a wall,’ Paul whispered. ‘There is a wall. Get the fuck out of my way and I’ll go and find it.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Mr Dao was smiling. His face was so calm it was beautiful. ‘And where exactly do you propose looking? This—’ he waved his arms at the encircling darkness. ‘This is all there is, this is everywhere. You can see it all from here. No wall.’

  Paul tried to look round, but he had no way of knowing whether his eyes were open or closed. Didn’t seem to make any difference. Where all places are one place, why bother?

  ‘Moo.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Mr Dao snapped. ‘Piss off, you stupid bloody cow. Go and chew something.’

  ‘Moo,’ replied the Great Cow of Heaven, and Paul wasn’t sure if that was a reply, an explanation, a rebuttal, an insult, an act of forgiveness or all of these things simultaneously. What he did know was that it was also an invitation. He sprang forward, fumbling to unroll the plastic sheet, and slapped it against the cow’s broad flanks. It stuck, and he trembled as he smoothed out the folds and wrinkles, like a passionate paperhanger.

  ‘This is your last chance, Carpenter,’ Mr Dao was yelling. ‘If you leave this time, that’s it. Don’t ever try and come back, do you hear me? If you leave, it’s for keeps, you can never come here again. Think about that, will you? Think about it.’

  There was the door handle, solid as solid could be. ‘I’ve thought,’ Paul said. ‘Cheerio.’

  He squeezed the handle as though he was trying to strangle it, and turned it half a turn to the left. The door opened. ‘Home,’ Paul said aloud, and stepped through.

  There was a door in his kitchen wall, one that hadn’t been there before. Paul stepped through it, fell forward and landed painfully.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he mumbled, and looked back over his shoulder. Apparently, God only knew how, he’d just walked out of his fridge.

  The fridge light wasn’t on; it was dark inside. He scrambled up - sharp tweak in the ankle - and peered inside. Oh, he thought.

  No milk in this fridge: no mouldy cheese, furry tomatoes, time-expired pots of yogurt. Instead, through where the back of the fridge should have been, he could see an endless absence of anything at all, except for the distant tiny figure of an elderly Chinese gentleman in a silk robe, shaking his fist at him and yelling something he was too far away to catch. Quickly he slammed the door shut, counted to ten slowly, and opened it again.

  The milk was off, and the cucumber he’d bought on a vague whim several weeks ago hadn’t made it. But there was a light. No darkness, no absence. Paul shut his eyes and sank to his knees, as the fridge door slowly swung shut. There was a gentle pop, as the seals met.

  ‘I did it,’ he said aloud. ‘I escaped.’

  No reply. Not even a faint lowing of distant cattle. Once again Paul was alone. The difference this time was—

  The difference was, he didn’t have to be. If he wanted, he could go outside. He could go to the shop on the corner, and there’d be people there. He was alive.

  He thought about that. ‘Good,’ he said.

  He stayed there, on the floor on
his knees, for quite some time; how long he wasn’t sure, because he wasn’t quite used to time having any meaning; a bit like jet lag, only much, much more so. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was, of course, which universe he was in, whether things outside were what he’d think of as normal or whether he was living in a world where Canada had a monopoly of the international banking sector and more medieval cathedrals than the whole of Europe put together. Like, he decided, it mattered. He had nothing against Canada. Live and let live, that was his motto. Especially the live part.

  I’m alive, Paul told himself. I was dead, and now I’m alive again. Thank God. Or thank Cow. Whatever.

  ‘What I’d like now,’ he said, still aloud, because it was so wonderful to be able to make a noise that existed outside his own head, ‘is a nice cup of tea. And a sandwich.’

  He paused and thought about that. Not a drop of drinkable milk in the place, of course; ditto edible bread, butter, and ham. All such things would have to come from outside this room, and maybe he was just being silly and overcautious, but he wasn’t quite sure if he was ready to go opening any more doors quite yet, for fear of what he might find on the other side. Every door opened was a risk, after all.

  ‘But I’ll settle,’ he decided, ‘for baked beans and tinned peaches.’ He knew that he had some of them, because he’d seen them in the lower kitchen cupboard a few days ago. He pulled out the cutlery drawer, found the tin-opener, then opened the cupboard door.

  It was dark inside, and there were no peaches. No baked beans either. No anything, just nothing.

  Very quickly indeed, Paul slammed the door shut and leaned his full weight against it. Not good, not good. Very bad, in fact. Obviously, it was better being here in his kitchen than back there with Mr Dao and absolutely nothing else; but he couldn’t very well stay here for ever and ever. There was also the singularly disturbing question of where here was.

  Paul had a nasty feeling that custard might enter into it, somewhere.

  Then he realised how very, very tired he was. Of course, sleep and food and stuff were only significant factors if you were alive, and arguably he hadn’t been, not for quite some time. He’d been dead; and before that he’d been in Custardspace, and before that - he couldn’t actually remember that far back with any degree of precision. He had vague recollections of sword fights and Van Spee’s crystals and goblins that appeared out of thin air and a lot of other stuff like that, but none of it seemed to want to stick, as though the inside walls of his mind were coated with Teflon. Instead, he remembered what it felt like to be drifting away into nothing, and the great big round eyes of the Great Cow. This wasn’t, he couldn’t help thinking, the way he’d have liked his life to turn out, if it had been up to him.

  No good, Paul told himself sternly. Might as well still be there, in fact it’d probably be better: bridge club and flower-arranging classes and first steps in conversational Spanish. But it was all very well being brave and grimly determined and never saying die; the plain fact was that he had every reason to believe that he was marooned here, a desert island with walls and doors instead of sea. Hopeless.

  Whereupon the phone rang.

  It took him a moment, one full beep-beep and then a single beep, to realise what the sound actually meant; then he dived at the phone like a hungry seal and knocked it off the table onto the floor.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello,’ said the voice at the other end. ‘Is Janet there, please?’

  Janet. Janet. Janet? ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I said, is Janet there, please?’

  Paul closed his eyes. One theory of Creation has it that God only made the human race so that He could have a straight man. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I think you’ve got a wrong number.’

  The voice apologised and rang off. Paul tried to move but he couldn’t, so he stayed where he was, on his knees with a phone pressed to his ear. Bugger, he thought. Bloody stupid. At the very least, I could’ve pretended to be Janet - it’d have been better than nothing.

  Of course he tried putting the phone back and picking it up again, tapping the little plastic spur thing (presumably it had got a name, an arcane technical term used every day of the week by telephone engineers), hoping for a dialling tone. Zip. Nothing. That old thing again.

  Eventually he gave up, dropped the phone back onto its cradle, and sank into a heap of arms and knees, like a pile of discarded laundry from which he’d carelessly forgotten to remove himself. His eyes closed, because there wasn’t really any reason why they should bother staying open. Days and nights of frantic activity, fear, disorientation and other fun stuff caught up with him like the ground catching up with someone who’s fallen a long way. And, since Paul had nothing much to gain from staying awake, he fell asleep.

  He was dead. Apparently Mr Dao had just been kidding, or he’d changed his mind, because he was quite definitely dead, and they were carrying him in his coffin, and in the distance he could hear the mournful tolling of bells; ring, ring-ring, beep-beep -

  Beep-beep?

  Paul sat up and snapped his eyes open. The phone again. He threw himself at it like a prop forward and stuck the receiver in his ear.

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘Yes. Yes!’ He paused. ‘Sorry, who is this?’

  ‘Paul? Are you all right?’

  Memories flooded his mind like the flushing of great celestial toilets. ‘Sophie,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Look, are you OK? You sound really weird.’

  Ah yes, but that’s because I am really weird. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Except that I think I’m sort of trapped here, in the flat. Like, all the doors, when you open them they don’t go anywhere. Except the Land of the Dead, of course. How are you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m all right. What do you mean, the doors don’t go anywhere? That doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t. Where are you ringing from?’

  ‘Me? The office. Mr Tanner asked me to give you a call. He wants to know why you haven’t come in today.’

  He wants to know why—Because I died. Because I only just managed to escape from a bunch of goblins who were going to execute me for a crime I didn’t do. Because last time I was in the office I wasn’t even Paul Carpenter, because Paul Carpenter died -

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, as calmly as he could manage, ‘but what day is it today?’

  ‘Thursday, you idiot. Same as it was this morning. Look, what’s wrong with you?’

  Paul knew the answer to that one. ‘I’m immature and self-centred and I have real problems relating to people, mostly because of my appallingly bad self-image, the result of a near-abusive family environment. What I meant was, what’s the date?’

  ‘The date?’

  ‘Which day of which month of which year.’

  ‘Paul.’ He knew that tone of voice only too well. ‘This really isn’t a good time, we’ve got to finish photocopying all those leases for Mr Suslowicz, not to mention Countess Judy’s filing and that bloody great big stack of Mortensen printouts. Trying to skive off work by pretending you’ve gone barking mad since five o’clock yesterday is like so childish, and I’m buggered if I’m going to do all this lot on my own.’

  ‘Sophe—’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  ‘No, but for fuck’s sake listen, will you? What did you say about filing?’

  Short, bemused silence. ‘I didn’t - Oh, you mean all those letters and reports and stuff we’ve got to file for Countess Judy. She’s getting really pissy about it, I promised her we’d have it done by Wednesday and she’s not the world’s most patient—’

  Countess Judy. If Countess Judy was still a partner, still in a position to order junior clerks about, then she wasn’t permanently banished to the Isle of Avalon, where Paul had sent her just a few months ago—

  ‘Sophie,’ he said. ‘I want you to do something for me. No, just shut up for a second and listen. Have you got your chequebook handy?’

  ‘Paul—’

  ‘No, plea
se, it matters. I want you to look at it, and tell me what’s printed on the cover. Please.’

  Long, ominous silence. ‘I’m not happy about this, Paul. I don’t think you should be screwing around with my head like this, at this stage in our relationship. I mean, presumably you think it’s a big joke—’

  ‘Just read the fucking chequebook!’ Paul yelled; partly to emphasise the message he was trying to get across, partly to drown out the echoes of that word relationship. ‘Really, I need you to do this for me. I’ll explain, I promise. Please?’

  ‘Oh, for—All right. It says, Imperial Bank of Canada, a wholly owned subsidiary of the—’

  ‘Thank you,’ Paul said. ‘That’s all I needed to know. I’m feeling much better now. Oh, by the way. Has Ricky Wurmtoter dropped by the office today?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll get a taxi or something.’

  ‘Paul—’

  He put back the receiver, and breathed out until his lungs were completely empty.

  Not Custardspace, because if it was Custardspace he’d be alone. But Sophie’s chequebook said the Imperial Bank of Canada, and she was in love with him, and Countess Judy was still there, and there was no Ricky Wurmtoter. Which meant—

  Paul took a moment to marshal the evidence, examine the implications. Because, in this version, King Hring had beaten King Hroar (or was it the other way around? Like he cared), the Vikings had settled permanently in Canada and founded banks, and the world was slightly different. Ricky Wurmtoter had died thirteen hundred years ago. Countess Judy obviously hadn’t made her bid for world domination yet. He was still a junior clerk, so no Mr Laertides - no need for Mr Laertides, whose sole purpose in existence had been to put right Theo Van Spee’s offence against time and space. And Sophie - he and Sophie hadn’t split up yet.

  Let’s have that one more time, please. He and Sophie—

  Hadn’t split up, because Countess Judy hadn’t hijacked Sophie’s mind and wiped out her love for him; and now, because he knew the other version, he could make sure that it never happened. All right, so the world had changed, and presumably the gnomes lived in Montreal instead of Zurich, and lots of big stuff wasn’t the way it should be - or the way it used to be, more like, because who was to say this version wasn’t every bit as good as the other one, or maybe even better? Actually, it was much, much, much better as far as he was concerned, and fuck the big stuff. This version was right - it had to be, surely, because what Countess Judy had done to Sophie was wrong, about as wrong as it was possible to get, so if changing the world had changed that, surely it had to be better, an improvement. And true, Paul hadn’t met a lot of Canadians, but the few he’d come across, or to be precise the one Canadian he’d met briefly at a party two years ago, had been perfectly pleasant and nice, a bit boring maybe, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but very polite and well mannered, definitely the sort of person you’d want running the world, particularly if it meant he could have Sophie back -